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Apple’s ‘cloak of invulnerability’ has lately been shredded by the MacDefender fake antivirus and the Pinhead and Boonana Trojans. Don’t worry, be proactive. Here are five tips to make your Mac more secure:

1. Don’t use ‘automatic login’

It’s cool to turn your computer on and instantly use it. But troubles can start when a computer is turned on by someone other than its owner… If you are concerned about your sensitive data, you can encrypt or simply disable the ‘automatic login’ function. Here’s how to do it:

On August 28, 2009, Apple released Snow Leopard. One of new functions added to this version is basic anti-malware tool called “XProtect”. The name is based on the name of one .plist file which contains strings that are necessary for detection. Apple had not provided a name for the tool, so developers made it. Read more…

You’ve probably seen applications for generating passwords. For those who have not, this is how the process actually works:

application for generating passwords is downloaded

user runs the application and presses the “generate” button

a string appears that looks something like this: I8kjH9s&ER1()G

this string is used as a password for his Mail / Facebook / Twitter / …

And now, the user has two options:

he’ll forget his new password immediately

to ensure that the new password is not forgotten, he’ll write it down on a sticker and put it on the computer monitor. If the user has other computer-generated passwords, he will place this “my email” sticker on top of the existing stickers.

So what’s the deal? Why am I telling you this? Because in a moment, we’re going to learn how to create secure passwords – and you’ll see that you are going to change passwords more often than you have previously. Because creating passwords can be fun.

There’s a groovy discussion in the world of Apple about the security of Mac OS. I’ve seen this kind of discussion many times and in most cases it had a quite similar scenario. We won’t go through this entire scenario (although it could be fun), we’ll just summarize the core of it with one phrase that pops up in all these debates: “There are no viruses for Mac OS.”